Independent Film Week 2009: How Depressing Does It Get?
Homunculus Productions recently moved its base from New York to the Fort Lauderdale Area, but I still go up to NY regularly to check out what’s going on in the indie film scene, run the Show and Grow Program for New York Women in Film, and keep up with my filmmaking friends.
The big event last week, of course, was the Independent Film Week 2009. You can read the IFP’s PR blog here, but this column isn’t about PR, this is about what it feels like to be a NY-flavored indie filmmaker (I haven’t sunk in my Florida roots yet) at this moment in time. I’ve been going to the IFP Film Market, which is what this event was at its inception, since I was in New York University’s graduate film program in the mid-80s. Back then, a filmmaker like Jennie Livingston could show a five-minute clip from her ground-breaking documentary Paris is Burning at the Independent Film Market and find a distributor. Livingston’s film (according to IMDBP.pro) cost $500K to make and earned $3.78 million after being picked up by Miramax. Still, she didn’t go on to make another feature (she’s made two shorts since then) and now you can find Livingston’s film on Youtube and watch it for free.
I mention Livingston because I was present at her IFM marketing pitch, where she showed a five minute clip from the film, and witnessing her success inspired me to go on and make my own documentaries. By the time I was able to complete my first independent documentary, Bare Hands and Wooden Limbs, to the point where I could take it to festivals in 2006 the distribution scene for social-issue docs had completely changed. Homunculus has three docs in various stages of production right now – Bare Hands is going to final mix so we can add Sam Waterston’s voice over; The Eight Faces of Jane is in post-production and Gluteus Maxximus is still shooting – but in this economic climate it seems unwise to add anymore docs to our slate.
The distribution situation has changed so much that it is impossible to sell social issue docs, and it is even getting harder to get them to where an audience can see them, unless you build up that audience yourself through social networking sites. That is the advice from the IFP conferences of the last several years: build up your own niche market through blogs, Facebook and Twitter, and then get your film out to that audience. Assume that you will pay for your film yourself and that you will make little or no revenue from it. In other words, indie filmmaking has become a venture for middle-class artists to claim losses on their income tax returns.
The fact that the conference was a fraction of the size of what it used to be and that members of my filmmaking generation such as Rose Troche and Peter Saraf were telling us to go into television and make our indie films on the side, basically says it all. The eighties model of indie filmmaking is gone; it’s not clear what is going to replace it, except that they will be short, shot and distributed digitally, with audiences found through data mining, and that no revenue stream has as yet been identified in this new world. You don’t have to take my word for it; I only attended the conference for one day, but Filmmaker’s Magazine blog has complete coverage.
Leaving the conference I felt like I had two choices: quit, or find the new ways to do things and re-create myself as a filmmaker, and not alone, but in conversation and cooperation with all of my filmmaking friends.
I have no intention of quitting, so I have to find a new way of doing things. The purpose of this blog is to document that journey of discovery as Homunculus finishes the docs on its slate and looks ahead to producing a fiction film.